Against Best Practices

It took me way too long to realize this, but my experience is that "zealots, idiots, and assholes" (as the author says) are going to abuse something and wield it as a bludgeon against other people. This appears to be a fixed, immutable property of the universe.

If you take it as a given that some number of people are going to get an idea lodged in their head, treat it like gospel, and beat as many other people in the head with it as they can... the best strategy you can adopt is to have the ideas in their head be at least somewhat useful.

Yes, reasonable people understand that "best practices" come with all sorts of context and caveats that need to be taken into account. But you won't always be dealing with reasonable people, and if you're dealing with an asshole, zealot, or idiot, I'd sure as hell prefer one who blindly believes in, say, test-first development versus believing that "test code isn't real code, you should spend all of your time writing code that ships to users" or some other even worse nonsense.

In any given culture (software development) you will have a set of traditions that may be used by the members of that culture to signify status, experience, pedigree and authority, and often some combination of all these and other descriptors. And, by virtue of creating a culture, you will also necessarily create a counter-culture, which rejects those things (performatively or otherwise) in an effort to do the exact same thing, but in the other direction. If you decide that proper software is developed with command-line in mind first, and UI second, you will in that effort necessarily create software devs who believe the exact opposite. This is core to our being as humans.

In my mind, this author is merely signaling software counter-culture, some of which I agree with, others I don't. And the people whom you describe above are signaling software culture, in a hostile and domineering way.

And of course, these two sides are not impermeable, forever persistent: culture and counter-culture shift constantly, often outright reversing from one another on a roughly 30 year timeline. And, they both have important things to offer. Best practices are best practices for a reason, and also telling stuffy people to chill out when they're focused so hard on best practices that they lose the plot of what the org is actually attempting to accomplish is also important.